At Ethan Allen's home, a rugged and rigorous life

Jan. 17, 2013

Loading Photo Galleries ...

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

Ethan Allen's homestead has been preserved and is today a museum and park. Allen moved to Burlington from Bennington in 1787 and lived in the home for three years before he died. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Dan O'Neil, the director of the Ethan Allen Homestead museum, holds up a feather similar to one Ethan Allen would have written with. Allen was both a war hero and the author of a philosophical treatise about Deism. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

More

Related Links

More than 225 years ago, Ethan Allen and his family cleared land on the outskirts of Burlington to create and settle one of the earliest farms in the area. (His brother, Ira Allen, was another first farmer.) Allen moved here from Bennington in 1787, and built a cape on a rise above the Winooski River. His homestead — which today is a park and museum open to visitors — is 2 1/2 miles from downtown.

When Allen arrived here and started to clear the Intervale land with his oxen and farmhands, there were three buildings in Burlington, historian and Allen biographer Willard Sterne Randall said. There was no money and nothing to buy. If you wanted something, you found a way to make it or make do without. Or you traded for it.

“The best word I can use to describe those conditions is medieval,” Randall said. “It’s not like Mount Vernon or Monticello. These are people having to do everything.”

Allen was born in Connecticut on Jan. 21, 1738 — his 275th birthday is in nine days. He was leader of the Green Mountain Boys, a Revolutionary War hero and a prisoner of war. He was a founder of Vermont, a political figure, and a writer; a philosopher and a land-dealer. At the time of his arrival here, there were three buildings in Burlington, Randall said.

Allen decided to move north, to write and grub out a living on the land, after a fire in a Bennington warehouse destroyed nearly the full inventory of his book, “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man.” Allen wrote the book, a philosophical treatise about Deism, and paid to publish 1,500 copies, all but 200 of which burned in Bennington. Allen’s financial outlay to print the book involved collecting debt and procuring more, selling land and hocking goods, Randall said.

He would live the last three years of life at his homestead north of Burlington. This was rough and rigorous living that necessitated constant, hard work, labor that changed with the seasons: cutting trees — including tall oak trees that grew by the river; clearing the land; building fences; planting and harvesting crops to feed livestock and people; splitting firewood; making tools; repairing equipment; hauling water; cooking over a fire in the hearth; spinning wool; making linen from flax grown on the farm; caring for children and animals, sewing and knitting; hunting and trapping.

The household consisted of 11 people: Ethan Allen and his second wife, Fanny Allen, six children and three hired hands, two men and one woman.

“They were working constantly,” said Randall, who lives in Burlington and is the author of “Ethan Allen: His Life and Times.” “It was constant work, year-round. It was a farm and a struggling new farm, with shortages of everything.”

Visitors to the homestead today can get a sense of this: the hearth that opens in two rooms, which warmed and lit the home. This is where the family cooked, and where the kids lay their straw-tick mattresses to sleep by the fire, and Allen set a chair for reading. There’s a spinning wheel, similar to the one the women would’ve use to spin wool, and beaver pelts that show what traps laid by the river might have yielded. A replica of the desk where Allen, with quill pen, wrote his 80-page addendum to “Reason” stands in the small front room.

Allen corresponded from the homestead, as well. A letter he wrote from his farm, dated November 1787, describes his life on the land — and refers, also, to his interest in a life of the mind. The letter appears in an article by David Blow that was published in the Chittenden County Historical Society Bulletin. (It is reprinted at www.ethanallenhomestead.org)

“I have lately arrived at my new farm of 1,400 acres in one body, in which are 350 acres of choice river intervale, a quantity of swales and rich upland meadow, interspersed with the finest of wheat land and pasture land well watered and is by nature equal to any tract of land of the same number of acres that I ever saw. I have put forty acres under improvement. The country settles fast and I wish that you were well settled in it. Little is said about philosophy here: our talk is of bullocks and our glory is in the gad. We mind earthly things.”

The Allen farm had its collection of animals: cattle and one cow, pigs, sheep, and oxen to pull a sled or a wagon, depending on the season, Randall said.

By the light of the fire, or in daytime when he wasn’t working outside, Allen read by the fire or wrote at his desk, Randall said. He received visitors and he traveled from his home north of Burlington.

He would die at the homestead at age 51, after falling into a coma traveling on ice, in a sled full of hay, with a farmhand called Newport, a free black man, Randall said.

The rugged and relentless subsistence living and Allen’s experience in the American Revolution — including three years as a prison of war — took a toll on his health, Randall said.

“He was big and strong,” Randall said. “People didn’t last a long time.”